What You'll Do
• Own the overall technical architecture of the platform - set the long-term vision and make the hard calls that balance speed, scale, and maintainability.
• Drive architectural decisions across multiple teams and systems, ensuring consistency, reliability, and developer velocity.
• Identify systemic engineering problems early and lead solutions that create org-wide leverage.
• Partner with engineering leads to design and review critical systems before they're built - not after.
• Champion and standardize engineering patterns, tooling, and infrastructure best practices across the organization.
• Evaluate emerging technologies with clear-eyed judgment and guide adoption where it genuinely moves the needle.
• Mentor and develop senior and staff engineers - raise the technical bar and help your colleagues do their best work.
• Represent engineering architecture in cross-functional discussions with product, operations, and leadership.
• Contribute to hiring decisions and help shape what world-class engineering looks like at our company.
What We're Looking For
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with a clear track record of org-wide architectural impact.
• Expert-level Go and deep knowledge of distributed systems design, microservices, and large-scale service architectures.
• Mastery of Docker and Kubernetes - you've designed production-grade, large-scale deployments and know where things break.
• Deep Linux/Unix expertise - you understand the systems your architecture runs on, from the OS level up.
• Proven ability to make irreversible architectural decisions thoughtfully, with an eye on long-term consequences.
• Strong communicator - you can make complex technical tradeoffs clear to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience leading through influence, not authority - you bring people along rather than dictating direction.
• Solid understanding of cloud-native infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps best practices.
Nice to Have
• Experience with industrial IoT, edge computing, or real-time data pipelines (MQTT, NATS, OPC-UA).
• Published Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), technical writing, or open source contributions.
• Background in platform engineering, developer productivity, or DevSecOps.
• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies.
• Time at a high-growth startup - you've felt the pressure of scaling fast and learned from it.
